MORE D&D Mechanics Inspired by Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Fate of Atlantis)

So it turns out Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, along with its expansion pack Fate of Atlantis, is so big that it deserves a second article on Pretzel Lectern! After putting around 130 hours into a single playthrough of the game, and after spending almost an entire year playing one Assassin's Creed game or another, I've decided to take a month or two break before I play Valhalla. Anyway! This is about the mechanics that you can use in your D&D game, so here we go. Oh yeah, and there are spoilers for the expansion, if that matters to you.

Conquering and Large Battles

As I was playing through chapter 1 of Fate of Atlantis and conquering the world of Elysium, I realized I completely forgot to talk about this key feature of Odyssey in my previous article, even though it's an important one. Each region of the game has a level of influence by either Athens or Sparta. To lower that influence, you can kill military commanders, burn war supplies, assassinate state leaders, and pillage war chests. Once you make the region vulnerable enough, the opposing side attempts to conquer the region through a Conquest Battle. Whichever side wins the Conquest Battle gains control over that region.

Of course, you as the protagonist are the driving force between every aspect of these power struggles, including the Conquest Battles, so they had to make it fun to be able to singlehandedly turn the tide of a large battle while also feeling like you're part of something bigger. I thought this was a great example of how to do this in D&D, which is most often a small group setting where each person controls one player. The last thing your players want is for the DM to sit and roll dice and tally up hit point pools for fifty NPCs fighting each other that have no effect on the PCs.

The trick that Odyssey does, and the trick for making it work in D&D, is to have the battle take place amid many other warriors fighting each other, but treat the other warriors as background setting for the players' conflicts. Keep a track for which side is winning, perhaps that leans into the side of the opposing source so that the players won't win without doing anything, but keep it abstract and focus on letting the PCs shine.

Start the scene of the fight in the middle of the conflict, with both sides clashing in the same general battlefield. Make the fight go in stages, with each of the PCs having a one-on-one battle with a low-CR foot soldier, then maybe two at once, then an officer. I would probably separate the players for this as well, and make it clear that soldiers from both sides are scattered everywhere, so a fireball spell would do just as much damage to your side as theirs. Moving closer together or from one area to the other would only provoke opportunity attacks from your current attackers, not every single enemy along the way, so some repositioning would be allowed.

Each kill can move the track farther towards victory, with officer kills giving more points than foot soldiers, and when the track runs out for either side, consider that side defeated and the survivors retreat.

If you did want to emphasize the raging battle around the players, you could have Lair Actions each round that describe one side getting an advantage over the other in a surge of morale, siege weapons raining down on one of the armies, or a cavalry charge that may knock players prone.

Understanding Truly Epic-Level Heroes

At least for me, Atlantis took place toward the end of the game, when a lot of secrets were revealed about the main character. I had already done some major questlines all across Greece, both on the sea and on land, won a wreath in the Olympics, assassinated high-ranking polemarches from both sides of the war, hunted down members of an entire cult, and met famous figures like Aristokrates, Hippokrates, and Aristophanes. Descending into the completely separate worlds of Elysium, the Underworld, and the gods*-ruled Atlantis was a completely new experience that really hit home to me what the "Masters of the World Tier" of D&D (levels 17–20) should feel like.

Since I've never run or played in a D&D campaign that's gotten all the way to 20th level and beyond, I didn't understand this concept until I played Atlantis. After leading a rebellion in the heavenly realm of Elysium itself, making peace with my past and recruiting legendary heroes in the Underworld, and forging god weapons and learning the secret of godhood itself in Atlantis, returning to Greece felt... awkward.

I had the power of the gods themselves infused into my normal abilities, as well as an arsenal of weapons that were stronger than anything found on the mundane earth, and I was riding on an otherworldly steed I had tamed in the Underworld. It felt like I didn't belong anymore. That I had transcended the reality that all the other humans were part of. I didn't have any desire to finish any more quests in Greece. I think I finally understand why D&D worlds still have problems even after they have epic-level wizards that can solve any problem with magic: the heroes realize how big the universe is, and small issues bore them and don't concern them anymore. Even if it is devastating for a family to have lost their cow, and some high-level adventurers could find and bring it back in an instant, the adventurers would just not have the time or care for such petty jobs anymore.

I'm rambling at this point and not entirely sure what I can get out of this, but basically it just gave me inspiration and understanding of the tiers of D&D. Make the players fit their role and level of fame in whichever tier they are currently in level-wise.

Challenging High-Level Players

The road to feeling like a god was not easy, and I commend the game developers for making that path challenging. I started the Atlantis expansion already feeling super powerful. I was around Level 50 and had access to all of the abilities in the game, and I had no idea I'd be getting enhancements to those abilities to make me feel truly godlike.

But each chapter of the expansion challenged me in ways I hadn't been before. The encounters were made up of roughly the same number of enemies with the same leveling progression as before, but they fought differently and had the power to temporarily disable my abilities. Later on, I fought enemies that would temporarily cut my life in half, making me more vulnerable, and in the last level of the game, all of my abilities were taken away entirely.

It's not good to make players in D&D feel helpless, but temporarily taking away or countering things they depend on, or their "go-to" combos and whatnot, can be a great way to make high-level play challenging again. Below are some ideas inspired from Atlantis that would be good to try on higher-level players if nothing's a challenge for them anymore:

• Spells (or possibly all class abilities) are suppressed within a certain area until they destroy an object that is generating the field of suppression.
• An effect cuts the players' maximum hit points in half temporarily (or even just gives them 4 levels of exhaustion)
• In order for an enemy to be vincible (or vulnerable, or prevented from coming back to life again), they must weaken the enemy by doing a set of tasks.
• Spells higher than a certain level (say 3rd) cause a Wild Magic Surge every time.
• A villain is invulnerable as long as he has minions around him.
• If a monster is attacked in a certain way, or is not killed quickly enough, it calls for help or gains a protective layer of temporary hit points.
• The players have to escort vulnerable cargo (or a person). They might feel like gods, but how well can they protect something with very few hit points?

As I said, I haven't had the chance to do enough research into this myself, but it seems to me that high-level players are hard to challenge because their class mechanics and magic items themselves are powerful, and relying on them without too much thought is easy. If you can dig down into what they needed to do as low-level players, that is, think through situations that have genuine risk, they'll start relying more on thinking through problems again.

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*Technically the Isu are not "gods" as such—they're much more complicated than that, but I use the term for the purposes of explanation and attributing it to D&D.